If the ice wouldn’t melt

Kentucky farmer and writer Wendell Berry has a poem called “Walking on the River Ice.” Here goes:

A man could be a god

if the ice wouldn’t melt

and he could stand the cold

A couple of weekends ago, we here at The Sowing Season were faced with a situation. We were snowed in, but the river wasn’t quite frozen enough for us to test Berry’s idea, as tempting as it was. But we couldn’t get the river out of our minds. So, we decided to embrace it as much as we could from the warmth and relative safety of the indoors.

For us this meant making a live video of our cover of “The River” by Anathallo. You can listen to the original at myspace.com/anathallo. It’s an intricate, beautifully complex song. The time signature changes back and forth at odd intervals, and lead singer Matt Joynt crams more than the recommended number of syllables into each measure. Even the articulation and enunciation of words shows close attention to the sounds of the words themselves as art. Beyond sound alone, the lyrics are more akin to prose poetry than conventional lyrics, and their tone and imagery are reminiscent of Wendell Berry’s personal narrative, “The Rise.”

Admittedly, our cover is much simpler. We don’t change meter. We don’t have marching bass drums to drive home the last chorus or two. And we don’t have the luxury of a horn section (though we are in the market).

What we do have is four friends on a frigid weekend, huddling for warmth around a song we love. Also, a camera.